[Scottish] End of year BIG archive!

[Martin Habets]

Neil,

> Hi - 
> Season's greetings to all :-)
> 
> I'm doing a big file archive of my years' work, and I want to span it over 
> several CDs.

Thanks for the reminder!

> To date, I have used the command 
> 
> tar -czPf /home/archive_file.tar.gz \
> big \
> file \
> list \
> which \
> spans \
> home \
> directories \
> for \
> several \
> users
> 
> which works fine for me. I save it as a shell script, and run it from time to 
> time.
> 
> Now I want to expand the file list to include many more directories, and I end 
> up with about 4 gig of tar file. Oops!
> 
> If I try to use Karchiver to split the file, it bombs out (I'm on SuSE 8.2, 
> using Karchver 3.1.1).
> 
> The man page for tar doesn't document how to use the -M switch for a 
> multivolume archive, so I'd like to ask if anyone has experience of using it, 
> and how I can split my archive into 650Mb segments.

>From my attempts I concluded that -M can only be used if you output to a device,
i.e. not with -f. Also, -M does not work with compression -j or -z I think.
I think I tried something like the -L flag Ben mentions, but I didn't get
anything like that to work with compression.

It seems GNU tar can only split an archive before compressing it, which is no
use for these purposes.

> No doubt there is an easy way to do what I want, and i tried Karchiver to do 
> this, but no success. If there's an easier way,  _please_  tell me how!!!

Question is: do you want to be able to restore 1 individual CD? If so, I think
each uncompressed tar file must fit on a CD (after it is manually compressed).
I did not need that, and I now backup my Linux partitions with something like:

tar -cvljf $ArchiveFile --exclude '/tmp' -V "$Label" $Directories

After that I write the single big archive file to CD, using the multi-CD capabilities
of cdbackup:

cat $ArchiveFile | \
        cdbackup -d $CDDevice -a "$CDLabel" -m -l $CDSize \
                -s $CDSpeed -- -v

-m is the multi-CD flag.

The script with it all has gotten rather big, but that is also because:
- the script can backup to a CD writer on another machine, i.e. cdbackup can be executed
  on another machine than the tar. Not all machines have a CD Writer after all.
- it can do incremental backups.
- I archive unmountable partitions (mostly bootstrap) with dd.
If interested I've put the full script at http://www.mph.eclipse.co.uk/pub/linux/bkup

I also looked at other backup programs out there, but was not satisfied with them.
Some could not backup to multi-CD, other were professional style and difficult to
configure.

Happy backup-ing (or something like that)
Martin

> TIA,
> 
> Neil


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